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In another life, I didn’t spend the entire Easter weekend managing virtual football teams, but instead spent it practicing fighting game combos. I like to think that this dimensional doppelgänger has enough good taste to make Street Fighter his puncher of choice. I’ve never been good at it, but I’ve read enough to know that it’s good. And the trailer below for Ultra Street Fighter IV, due out early June August, makes me wish I could trade places with my other self for a while. Check out the stage with the dinosaurs in the background.

The new Ultra edition adds new characters and six new stages, but I suspect the largest change will be the new Red Focus ability, which allows you to absorb chains of attacks before launching your own counter move. I have no idea how it works, but tweaks like these tend to have large repercussions for competitive communities. SF4’s competitive scene is excellent.

I used to play Super Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES. Back then, I liked the game for its distinct character designs; even as a child, I could understand the differences between Guile and Blanka in a way I couldn’t with characters in Mortal Kombat or Body Blows or, lol, Rise of the Robots.

Today, the appeal for me is similar. I love the art design, the backgrounds and the colourful characters of Street Fighter IV. I’m a little sad that fighting games are never going to be a focus for me – I think I’d need a nearby arcade, a group of friends who play, and the slower rotation of planet earth – but every part of its world seems joyous. I kind of want to live inside it. Heck, I’d live inside almost any fighting game. I have a print of this on my wall. Can you ID the game?

Concerning the upcoming SF4 DLC: I think in this case you, RPS, might for once not be critical enough. I do look forward to it. Don’t get me wrong. But it still seems Capcom is milking the competitive scene as hard as they can: all the new characters and stages are taken directly from Street Fighter X Tekken, with the exception of Decapre, who is basically Cammy in a new costume with some new moves – some of them even ARE the same as Cammy’s! Only things completly new are the system mechanics, which are the possibility to deceide for one Ultra or the other during a match instead of before, the abilitiy to absorb more than one hit and the ability to delay standing up after a knock down. It sure is a juicy patch. But making it a DLC costing 15$ is a smart move, because Capcom KNOWS everyone trying to play SF4 competitivly pretty much HAS TO buy this, but it is not at all a nice one.

Oh, and the release date: it’s June for the digital DLC for consoles. Full retail game and digital DLC for consoles comes around in August. Another nice thing from Capcom: they know the people playing this on PC are few compared to consoles, so they adjust their priorities accordingly.

The consoles had no upgrade path for SFIV either, it was never designed to have one. That’s ancient news. They held to their promise of making the followup upgradeable without needing new versions. My only worry is what happens if you have a NON-steam copy right now. All they need to do is let us register a Steam copy ala Batman AA:AC with the cd-keys, but no word on that yet…

If I remember right, Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition will get GFWL removed (and you will be able to upgrade directly from that game to this for a cheaper price), but not vanilla Street Fighter 4. Not sure on Street Fighter X Tekken.

From what’s been said, Capcom isn’t patching GFWL out of any of their existing PC games, though Capcom has repeatedly put its various GFWL PC games on sale since the GFWL shutdown leak happened.

Ultra is a bit of a special case, and Super may benefit from that (though the similar engine SFxT allegedly won’t). With the PC release coming around the final days of GFWL, Capcom’s only choice was to either not release it on PC or to switch to a non-GFWL alternative. I’m honestly a little surprised that they chose the latter over the former. (Though Capcom did try to spin the initial announcement as an example of how they listened to fans. Like Capcom would have dropped GFWL for Steamworks even if MS hadn’t already told developers to not continue with implementing GFWL service.)

I’m not talking about whether or not this game’s pricing is fair, though I do think it is good to keep older players while still making money from newer ones. I just find it a bit silly that Capcom’s calling Street Fighter Four a series, though I guess calling it the apex of the Street Fighter series as a whole would make for flame wars.